Ten Deaths for Darling Jim
by MeddyGrey
Summary: A series of one-shots where our hero meets his end a different way.
1. To Be Loved by the Sea

A/N - As some may know about me, I love to kill me some heros. So, over the past few months I've thought of all sorts of ways for my buddy Jim to eat it. These are ways of 'getting it out of my system'.

This one was my first idea that I thought up when I was re-watching season two and writing 'Night Windows'.

-SL

* * *

1 – "To Be Loved by the Ocean" - Drowning in Australia

* * *

Cool water.

It surrounded him, embraced him, cradled his broken heart within its salty, soothing waves. Up and down. Up and down.

He had found this secluded little beach not far from the resort where he had been languishing for the last few days, unable to get his mind off of what was happening today on the other side of the planet. He was celebrating June the tenth in his own way, here in the quiet little place where he had finally been able to find some solace by sitting on the beach and letting the surf wash over him again and again. Crashing noises and cool water, at one with the sand, the rocks, the shells. He felt his mind ease and for a while, forget.

Like the song of the Sirens, the waves called him further, to not be content with merely their gentle lap, but to enter their Mother, the Ocean, and feel Her around him, to let Her endlessness love him like no one else. He could not resist their call to go to Her, so he waded out as far as his long legs would send him, then he felt Her lift him from the ground like he were a child, like he weighed nothing at all. He closed his eyes, relaxed and let his body float, carried in Her gentle arms, and for the first time in so many weeks his mind was completely at ease.

In this trance-like state, he forgot about time, forgot about the shore. When he remembered that he belonged to the land, that his heart still belonged to a woman very far away, he saw that the sun was sinking low over the waters and that the shore was somehow impossibly far away. Panic gripped his heart, like waking up beside a strange person after a night of too many drinks and tears, and he started to desperately swim back. But his new lover would not be spurned.

As his tired limbs began to burn and slow despite his great effort, he began to feel Her pull down on his legs with an undercurrent. He felt his fighting become more futile, no more landward motion remained, only his steadily weakening treading keeping his face above the water line. He coughed and spat as salty water drove up his nostrils and down into his lungs, and he took his last taste of air as he was consumed by the waves.

He sank further down, his heart pounding, his mind thinking only of more air and how to get it. Five seconds. Ten seconds. Thirty seconds. His mind began to clear of panic then; he felt Her with him, Her soft currents, Her soft but unbreakable grasp.

She entered him, Her waters filling his mouth, his throat, his lungs; he felt the fullness of the Ocean's embrace of love. And Her waters gave him the transcendent peace of Her own endlessness.

He was one with Her, and Hers alone forever.

Far away, the woman from his thoughts finally thought of him, too late. He belonged to Her, the Ocean, and She never gave up any of those whom She loved.


	2. Broken

A/N: I've read a lot of stories where they say how Pam could 'break' Jim if she left him. I had considered doing this as the twist in "Night Windows", but I didn't feel like making Pam that awful, but I've attempted that in this story. I ended up re-writing a portion of this, as I originally took a lot of the blame off of her. So, I suppose it should be a warning that Pam is not treated well in this story. There is also a lot of swearing, so I don't want to hear any "My Freakin' Ears!" ; )

* * *

"Broken"

He found himself alone. She wasn't sleeping still on the other side of their bed as she had been for the past six months, and this automatically struck him as strange. The house somehow felt different to him as he sat up and shot his still sleep-laden eyes around the room to see if she were somewhere near. The house was quiet and still. He knew something was very wrong.

He got up quickly and began to walk out to the kitchen, tense.

"Pam? Pam, what'cha doing up so early?" he called out into the empty house. Nothing had been moved from the night before: pictures where they had been hung the week they moved in only a few months ago, her winter coat on the peg by the door, yesterday's dishes left lazily by the kitchen sink. But somehow he knew that she wasn't there.

"Pam?" he said again, with apprehension lacing his voice. He looked into the laundry room, the hall closet, behind the bathroom door, and then peeked out the front. Only their paltry strip of lawn and the dull morning sun creeping over the houses across the street. Even her car was still parked in the driveway.

He shut the door and walked back into the house, baffled. As he scratched his hand through his messy morning hair, a small folded sheet of notebook paper on the cluttered coffee table in front of their beat-up old couch caught his eye. His heart sank to his feet. Sitting down, he slowly reached to pick up the paper; his hand trembled slightly. He knew already what was happening.

"_Jim—_

_I can't do this anymore._

_You're not what I need._

_I don't know if I ever loved you, maybe I just loved the idea of "US"._

_Keep everything, just don't follow me._

_ -Pam"_

The world suddenly seemed unreal. This didn't happen to real people, didn't happen to them; these are things for television and soap operas.

"Why, Pam, why?" he pleaded to the note, to her, to the empty house, tears beginning to well over his eyelids as he continued to stare at the note. The cold, baffling, hurtful note. He then let it drop to the carpet, tears following it down, making little patter noises against the thin paper.

It was then that he saw the engagement ring. She had left it underneath the note. It was then that he completely broke down: falling over on his side, choking on tears, he curled up into a ball and stayed that way the rest of the day.

* * *

Three months. That's how long it had taken him to finally track her down. She'd changed her cell phone number, left everything she ever owned, save two-thousand dollars that she'd taken from her savings account the day she left, and he found that she had been operating under an assumed name at the place she was working out in Cleveland – a home interior design studio. Clever, he had to admit, changing her ID and starting over so completely. But that wasn't enough to dry up his last ounce of hope – that stubborn hope that loved her more than he knew he should by this point in their entanglement in each other's lives. Nor was it clever enough to dodge the paranoid eyes of some of Dwight's demi-law enforcement friends from helping him find where she'd gone and what her alias was.

"Pam Bolles… Pam. Finally," he said to himself, sitting in his car where he had been waiting for a number of hours, waiting for a glimpse of her outside the studio where they had assured him that she was working.

And then there she was, walking off of the 8:25 bus by the street corner. He smiled, likely for the first time since the day she left. She was there, all bouncy curls, but thinner, wearing more make-up, and in new clothes that seemed flashier than she had ever been before, but somewhat garish, like she was trying too hard. The scarf around her neck had too many tattered edges; the black stockings she wore under a trendy yellow skirt screamed of an urban edginess that the almost scared uncomfortable demeanor on her face did not match. He hoped the Pam he knew was still there somewhere, underneath all of that.

He took a deep breath, then quickly opened the door and began to walk towards her purposefully.

"Pam?" he all but shouted across the street. She looked about quickly, confused when she heard her name echo down the streets in a voice she was not expecting He moved faster and waved as her unfocused eyes passed over him, then a moment later she recognized him. Her face fell into a shocked disdain. She froze when he caught up to her, where he stood a couple feet away.

"What are you doing here?" she hissed, "I told you not to follow me, and despite my best efforts, here you are!" her words stung like a whip.

"Why are you doing this?" he gesticulated to her, up and down with his hand at her new look, at the unfamiliar city around them, at his own confused, broken heart. "Why did you leave like that? God, I thought something happened to you, or that maybe I'd done something that you never told me about." He looked at her earnestly for a moment, unable to hide the tenderness that he still held for her, the small flutter of love in his heart that made him almost smile to be this near her again. She stared back at him, her face like a stone mask, emotionless and cold.

"Why won't you talk to me? God, I'm so damned confused, but I couldn't let this go unresolved," he begged.

"There's nothing to say, Jim," her voice spitting his name out of her mouth like it was foul-tasting. "I said everything I needed to on that note I left for you."

"But there has to be more reasons? Why couldn't you have told me something was wrong? Was it moving in together? The engagement? Pam… I would have waited as long as you needed to work stuff out." He received no response from her again, her face set back where it had stayed before. "I guess I just don't get this. Can't we go somewhere and talk about—"

"There is NOTHING to talk about!" she shouted and turned away in a huff.

"Pam?" he said back to her, frustration lacing his voice, and he grabbed her arm as she turned around, only to have her reel back and yank her arm away.

"Don't TOUCH me!" she screamed again, huffing now with anger, making Jim back away, wide-eyed. "Alright, Jim, listen to me. I meant every word that I told you. YOU are not what I need, YOU are not what I wanted, I never loved YOU for one damned minute, Jim Halpert! You were confusion, you were just another lie to myself that was keeping me from being happy, keeping me from myself. As far as I'm concerned, you may as well been another Roy, where I did this little dance to be someone for someone else. Well, this is ME being ME and I don't want you in MY life. Is that clear?" she ended her tirade with a venomous little smile.

Jim stood there, dumbfounded, crushed.

"So… it was all an act?" he whispered, looking at the ground.

"So to speak. I didn't even know it was an act, but one day I woke up and knew it was all wrong, all a lie."

"Why couldn't you have at least told me?" he murmured even softer now, tears visibly trailing down his face.

"Because… I had to find myself and I didn't want you trying to 'work it out'. You didn't matter in my world, you were just something that was keeping me from being real."

A moment of silence passed between them, a breath of wind blew.

"And you… never loved me?"

"No…" she said, her face showing a fleeting break of emotion, but it dissolved back into her stony determination, "I never really loved you, ever. I don't love you, Jim, and I don't care for you. I want you to leave, go home, and don't try to find me ever again. Do you understand me?"

He looked up one more time into her eyes, steely and unyielding, his own face stricken with grief and tears.

"_Do you understand me?"_ she asked again, harder.

He nodded slowly. She responded by turning on her heel and continuing on her way to work like nothing had just occurred. But Jim stood there, drawn and quiet, utterly crushed, looking at the ground like he could see the dust of his own heart get blown away with the wind. As he turned around to retreat, he could hear from the doorway of Pam's workplace:

"Hey Pammy, who's that out there giving you a hard time?"

"I dunno. Just some weirdo off the street who thought I was someone he knew."

* * *

Pam had found it hard to remember that day without bile rising in her stomach, without her face flushing and her eyes welling up with new tears. And for so many reasons beyond the obvious.

That had been the beginning of two years of a living nightmare for her, filled with dangerous, strange people, drugs, and months on end that to this day she has no idea where she was, who she was with, or what she had done. At this point, she thought it best that she didn't remember – she didn't need any more regrets in her life. That kind of living gets someone to two conclusions, or at least in Pam's experience: one ended in rehab owing everyone you've ever met a lot of apologies and explanations, the other, you were dead. And even though she had spent more time in rehab then she ever wanted to, she considered herself lucky because she could have easily been like many of her friends from that time who didn't make it.

And now here she was, riding a greyhound bus from Philadelphia, where she was still living with her mother since leaving the halfway house a year ago, on her way back to Scranton. She looked from her window at the familiar, but still surreal sights of the city she had once called home a practical lifetime ago. Four years was not long in the grand scheme of things, but she'd felt like she'd aged by twenty, and had enough trouble for a hundred.

She still wasn't sure what she was doing coming back here, knew that she had no business bearing her wretched little head to the streets of the place she had scorned and rejected the one man she had ever met who truly and unselfishly cared for her. She knew she had to find him, despite her shame over what she ruined.

There was still the problem she was having with finding him, and now, as she stepped down the stairs off of the bus and meandered her way out of the bus depot, she was right back where she had been before she even left: she didn't know where he was, really. A month or two of internet searches had enabled her to track down every other 'James Halpert' in the United States, none of whom had been her Jim.

So with no leads, she decided to just head down to Scranton and see what she could dig up. She knew that he didn't work for Dunder-Mifflin anymore, as that company had gone out of business a good year and a half ago, and she did feel some odd relief at knowing that there was no way that she could ever find herself back there amongst those poisonous people again. Although, she found herself missing Dwight and Michael on occasion when she felt like she needed to laugh at someone.

"Guess I'll just walk around downtown, get some lunch, then start digging through the phone book…" she mused and started off into downtown Scranton.

Much to her surprise, she had hardly walked a block before someone recognized her. She accidentally walked too close to a man going in the opposite direction, and when they turned around for the proprietary 'excuse me', the man's face dropped into a look of surprised recognition.

"Pam? Pam Beesly?"

"Yeah, that's me… gosh you look really familiar," she replied, squinting her eyes a little to try and remember him through the fuzzier memories of the past years.

"Pam, wow, it's Mark."

"Oh my God! It's so good to see you," she said, her heart dropping when she was sure who he was: Mark, Jim's roommate and one of his better friends from when they were dating. She knew the look that he was giving her now; it was the same one that she got when she met someone that she had burned in the past.

"Yeah, you're like the last person on planet Earth I expected to run into down here," he began tersely, crossing his arms. "How's Cleveland been treating you?"

Shit, he must know a lot, she thought, wincing. "Not at all, really, I haven't been in Cleveland for about two years now."

"Really? What brings you back to grubby ol' Scranton then?"

Ouch again. "Well, um, this might sound weird after everything that's happened, but I'm kind of trying to find Jim again," she told him, sheepishly, noting again the look of reserved disdain for her overflowing Mark's eyes when she mentioned Jim. "I have a lot I need to apologize for."

"No kidding," he quipped, looking thoughtfully back and forth down the street. "Bet you're having a hard time, eh?"

"Yeah, I am," she tried her best to keep her brave but humble face on, though she felt like she was going to break into tears at any moment. She knew that Mark must hate her, but she had to do this.

"He is a bit hard to get in touch with these days."

"Yeah, you think you can find anyone with the internet, but it's like he's just dropped off the planet. I mean, I was even hoping for an e-mail address or something… Do you keep in touch still?"

"Not very well, no, we don't talk much anymore…" Mark appeared thoughtful again, then looked down at Pam and cocked a hint of a smile. "I know where he is though. I could take you to see him if you want to take a ride with me."

"Really, you'd do that?" she asked, fear and excitement building up: she may see him today? Not really prepared for that.

"Yeah. Come on, my car's down this way."

She followed him back to where his little Toyota was parked along the street and got in with him. She then proceeded to get lost in watching the buildings go by, as she often did now after the drugs had singed the edges off of her mind, until Mark broke the silence.

"I guess I'm gonna cut to the chase here," he began ominously, "Why'd you up and leave Jim, Scranton, your life basically, the way you did? It's not like we all didn't have our theories… you were abducted by aliens, you went off the deep end, but what's the truth of it all?"

Pam sighed. She was expecting this eventually, and still it was hard to answer. "I guess… I mean, sometimes people make bad choices when they're scared, you know?"

"I'd say insanely bad choices," he quipped back.

"Um, yeah… Looking back, I think I had some anxiety problems when it came to big changes in my life. I'd really been trying hard to hide the fear in me from Jim, and it wasn't hard with all the moving in and the engagement. But that night that I left, I was just overcome by it all… and for some reason, I wanted to blame it all on him, that I must have really wanted something else, to be someone else, or I wouldn't be so full of fear and worry about our plans together. Then I made the worst decision in my life: I chose to leave Jim."

"Hrm," was all she heard from Mark. From the look of him, he seemed to know the cruel nature of the note she left for Jim.

"The letter I left… I didn't want Jim coming after me, because I knew he wouldn't give up if I just tell him I was starting over… and I was starting to convince myself that maybe I didn't love him, and that he wasn't anything I really wanted. So I just put that on there. I knew it would tear him up, but the only thing on my mind by that point was getting away from that fear and anxiety that lived with me at that house. And maybe he'd be hurt enough to never come looking for me again." She stopped there, tears welling up at the corners of her eyes, tears of painful, painful regret.

"So you just convinced yourself not to care?" he said slowly. She nodded back at him, unable to open her mouth in fear of breaking down with embarrassment. "That's pretty fucked up. So by the time he found you, you really must have come to think that Jim was the root of all evil, then?"

She winced: he knew about that too? "I… God," she buried her face in her hands and squeezed the tears from her eyes. She didn't want to relive this again, but, she had to keep going, the need for some sort of absolution strengthened her humility. And if she couldn't even face one of Jim's friends with the truth, how would she ever be able to face Jim?

"You need a break? This too much?" he asked her, the edge on his voice still there, but mercifully less so than earlier. She shook her head and looked down at her hands.

"I can do this. I was confused when I ended up in Cleveland… scared, too really. I'd just left everything I'd ever known behind, and I really didn't know what to do. I ended up in a bad part of town and befriended some people I shouldn't have… after about a week, I started to regret what I'd told Jim, and they helped me forget about it the only way they knew how. This one girl who'd be my best – and worst – friend for the next year turned out to be a meth dealer, and she convinced me that it would help me with my problems.

"By the time Jim tracked me down, I was pretty hooked on the stuff… it made me feel alive and powerful and strangely in control of my life like I never had before, helped me feel like I was where I should be and that I had been totally right about Jim and everything. So when I saw him… Oh God, I barely remember what I said, but I just remembered feeling so powerful and heady that it almost felt good to just tell him off, to have such control over someone else's actions…"

"That's so damned fucked up…" Mark said under his breath.

"And I'm so sorry for it all, you don't understand! After that, I was so conflicted and guilty that I just turned to more stuff, more partying to drown it all out," she said, openly crying now, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hands. "I know it's all my fault and I'm just so good at making awful decisions, and this… I ruined my life with this. Two years of drugs and parties and sex and I have months I don't remember… I'm lucky because I'm alive, because most of my friends from then are either dead or in jail or so fucking blown that they're no good for anything anymore."

Mark didn't look at her, his jaw set sternly as he threw the gearshift into park. "We're here," he said shortly as he got out of the car.

Pam climbed out of her seat, realizing that as she had been telling him her story that she had not paid attention to where they had been driving for the past fifteen minutes. As she came around to the other side, the midday light burning her eyes a bit, she looked around with horrible recognition of where he had taken her:

"Laurelwood cemetery…? But…?" her jaw dropped slightly and she stared in disbelief at Mark. She could see something like sadness take his features next to the mild anger towards her.

"I told you I'd take you to see Jim. He's this way," Mark began to walk off down one of the lawns, and Pam could do nothing but numbly follow.

She lingered a few yards behind when Mark stopped one of the multitude of marble headstones along one of the grassy hills of the cemetery. This spot was definitely newer, with freshly covered graves sill covered in garlands of flowers not far away. Pam began to slowly shuffle her way around graves and headstones, watching Mark stand contemplatively, hands thrust into the pockets of his jeans, as he looked down at a headstone with slightly wilted roses in the cup next to it.

"His mom still comes out here once or twice a month… leaves yellow roses for him. She said—"

"—They were what he always gave her for her birthday since he was fourteen…" Pam finished his sentence for him, her eyes wide with shock, with guilt, with sudden, unexpected grief. "I… I had no clue… when?"

"Read the headstone."

She moved close enough now, saw his name printed there before her, 'James P. Halpert, beloved son'. She peered at the date and said aloud, "October 10th 1979 to… Oh no… that was only…"

"Two months. Two months after he saw you that last time," Mark muttered, still staring down at where his friend had been laid to rest.

"How…?" was all she could get out, her eyes rapt, her mind racing. "He didn't… he didn't hurt himself, did he?"

"No… no, when he got back from Cleveland he seemed pretty calm, calmer than we all thought he should have been when he got back empty-handed. He just seemed different, and we all just chalked it up that he was feeling like a tool for not treating you right and losing you."

Pam turned suddenly to look at him. "What? He told you that it was his fault? But…"

"Dumbass didn't want to slander your name even after what you did to him…"

Pam's heart sunk further down into her shoes, guilt building higher and heavier with each of Mark's words.

"I guess I'm the only one on this end now who knows the truth, save him," he nodded down at the ground, "and like I said before, he's not talking much now. I mean, it's not like I didn't have my suspicions, he'd always been nothing but totally devoted to you so it didn't make sense that he could have drove you away… I guess he should have picked up on it before it happened… poor bastard.," he smiled mirthlessly.

"Then what happened to him? Why did he die?" she pleaded Mark to tell, her face a mess of mascara and tears.

" No one knows."

Like it was the theme for the day, Pam found herself shocked beyond words. Before she could ask him to, Mark went on with the story.

"He went back to work, he packaged your stuff up and put it in storage, sent back all the wedding stuff, moved into a small apartment, the normal break-up back tracking. He'd come hang out with the guys sometimes, sometimes he'd stay at home, but still, pretty normal for Halpert. But something was off, and we all knew it," he paused and began pacing beside the grave as he walked through his memories of his friend's last days.

"He wasn't eating much, he was quiet… really quiet. He'd smile and laugh with us, but his stories, his witty words, all gone. Like something ate 'em up. Sometimes I'd see him looking far away, looking dim, like that spark that made Jim 'Jim' was getting smaller.

"He kept up with stuff ok for that first month, but then I think by that second month he didn't have it left in him to fake it. I know he kept going to work, but he was getting some heat for not making many sales, the buncha assholes… Then he stopped going out with us, even wouldn't pick up his phone if someone called. The last time we talked… man… he looked like if I stared to hard at him, I could see through him, if I sneezed he'd blow away. He swore he was still eating, that he would be ok – it was just harder for him than he'd anticipated getting past losing you. But just seeing him… a shadow of the man I knew…

"I wasn't surprised that much when we found him…" Mark paused again, sniffing back a tear at the memory.

"It had been a couple of days since anyone had seen him. He hadn't shown up for work Monday, and when me and a couple of his other friends had gotten a call from his mom asking if we'd talked to him since he hadn't returned any of her calls in a few days, that's when we decided to go over to his place and see what was going on. His mom had only been kind of worried, but me, Ben, and Wally, we knew something else was wrong besides normal old post break-up blues.

"We got to his place, and the door wasn't locked, so we went in. We almost thought he wasn't there, but he was back in his room, curled up in his bed. Dead."

"No…" Pam shook her head, though she knew this already to be true, to hear it… to hear it said that way was so real.

"We had been shouting at him to get up, then I yanked the blanket off of him and poked him in the ribs, that was when," he snorted again, tears coming down one eye now, remembering it like it had just happened again, "I felt how stiff he was… then I noticed he wasn't breathing… then we turned him over to see his face all pale and cold and… God, no one should have to find their goddamned best friend dead!"

He kicked at the grass and stomped back and forth a couple of times, glared at Pam, who had dropped to her knees in front of Jim's headstone, beside herself, waved his arms before getting to the end of his retelling.

"There was no gunshot, no knife to the chest, no empty bottle of fucking Tylenol in the house, nothing! The goddamned coroner didn't find a thing either! No brain tumor, no cerebral hemorrhage, no fucking heart attack, he was thin but not starved, not dehydrated, nothing was broken! I mean, they said that sometimes, sometimes people just die, you know? Like their body just decided that it was done, time's up, and for no detectable reason, just turns off. But how does that help his devastated mom? His dad? His friends? We were all left without him and without a reason."

Pam rocked back and forth where she was now sitting, unable to contain her guilt and shame and grief; she knew what was coming, because now she believed what Mark was going to say to her too.

"But I always wondered… how he had faded when you left," he looked down at her, though she could not bring herself to look back up at him. "You hear about animals and other crap dying of a 'broken heart'. I always thought that was a load of shit… but then as I watched Jim fade away right in front of me, I started to think it was possible."

He knelt down next to Pam, his eyes still boring into the side of her head, as she still would not face him. He spoke again, his voice low and intense.

"And now I know, now that I know what really happened between you two. That someone's heart can get so fucking shattered that it kills them. I'm no scientist, but I'm damned sure that's why Jim Halpert's dead."

She finally turned to look at him, reduced to a whimpering mass with Mark's eyes accusing her, but his accusation paled in comparison to the turmoil and utter despair she felt, for she knew. She knew there was no 'I'm sorry' good enough, there was no sheepish smile and enduring of harsh words that could make this right again. She had destroyed the one person in this world who had loved her more than she ever deserved in a hundred lifetimes.

* * *

After that day, no one ever heard from Pam Beesly again. Her mother hoped she had once again gone to start a new life. Jim's other friends from Scranton, when they heard from Mark that he had talked to her, hoped that maybe she had thrown herself off a bridge or was dead in some crack house far away. But Mark felt otherwise. He couldn't say why, but he knew that she was out there, walking the Earth like some cursed spirit, living to atone for her cruelty. In that, he hoped, on that day when she finally did meet Jim again, there would be nothing more broken between them.


	3. The Silence that Separates Them

**A/N: Wow, it's been a while since I've written anything for this one! Between work and school, I haven't had much time for anything, let alone something fun like writing.**

**Anyway, here's another uplifting deathfic about my wonderful TV crush. I apologize now for the length, but I didn't have the heart to break it into little pieces.**

**A little insight into what inspired this particular death: this is one I've always had a personal fear of, because of how unexpected it is, and in my more paranoid moments, I've poked my darling husband to make sure he's still breathing when he's asleep next to me. I guess poor Pam gets to live out some of my worries.**

**So read, maybe enjoy, maybe review?**

**-SL**

**xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox  
**

**"The Silence that Separates Them"**

**xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox  
**

Mom...

My mom's always been a little weird, I guess. I mean, it's not totally obvious like, you know, running out in the street with just her underwear or making us all eat weird tofu and stuff like that. Really, I guess no one thinks she's weird at all, except me. It's only when she's around me, and looks at me, that I think that something's off with my mom.

I think the first time I noticed, the first time I really remember it was my first day in second grade. I don't remember a lot of things really well before then, mostly pictures in my head of people and places she took me, but second grade... We'd moved, like we did a lot until mom got her design job out here in Petaluma, but we moved back with gramma and grampa because she was going back to school and needed some help, or at least I think that's why. I think it was the last place we lived in Pennsylvania, though.

Anyway... you know, I'd been in school for like three years by then, but she'd been acting funny at home when gramma and grampa were out, like she was nervous or sad, or something. But she'd always go right back to being normal mom with her big smile and cheesy jokes as soon as she noticed that I was watching her. The morning I went to school for the first time that year, she made me the same special breakfast that she's made on special days for my whole life – grilled cheese sandwiches on buttered white bread. Man, I don't know what it is about those, but I don't think anything will ever be as good as mom's grilled cheese with that crappy Kraft singles and all that butter...

Well, after all that, she gets me to school and it happens: she's looking at me and her eyes get all teary and far-away, and for a little while I felt like she wasn't seeing me at all anymore And that's weird when you're seven. And we stood there, with her hands on my shoulders and I'm not sure if she's planning on letting me go in, and had to ask her if she was OK – funny now that I think about it, the little boy asking his mom if she's ok letting him go to school. That snapped her out of it, and she told me that she was fine and she'd be waiting for me after school. And that was the other weird part.

I remember I stuck around in the classroom talking to one kid who I'd just made friends with and I came out about five minutes after everyone else. Five minutes. And when I came down the front steps, there she was, freaked out looking around through the groups of kids all going home, here eyes all wide and red like she was trying not to cry again. Then she saw me and practically ran over a bunch of kids to get to me and wrapped me up in her arms and stood there again with me for like a minute. When she finally seemed to get herself together, she looked down at me – she was crying. Jeez, I've never known what to do when mom's crying, except try and be really good and do whatever she says, so when she pretended like nothing weird had just happened and asked how my day went I just answered as well as I could. And by the time we were home it was like nothing had happened. She was herself again, and I tried to forget about it.

But something makes mom weird around me.

I think it must be something about my dad.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox

"Mom! Hey, mom, you back there? I got the proofs for my Senior portraits back, you wanna see 'em?" he called across the house, sloughing off his backpack and basketball jersey onto the couch. He set the heavy envelope onto the kitchen table and immediately made for the fridge for a snack.

"Oh oh oh! I want to see, I'm coming!" and from her bedroom she came, her hair in a towel and in her robe and slippers. Nothing fazed him now, living with just her for his seventeen years of life; he'd seen her in curlers, in a hideous slip, in a mint julep masque with cucumbers, everything. And as long as he'd remembered, he'd find a way to make her laugh about it.

"Did you just get up? I'm here, slaving away at school all day and you're sleeping the day away," he quipped nonchalantly as he munched on a ham sandwich, one hand in his pocket while he leaned against the kitchen counter.

"And you're already eating again, I see," she retorted, finding her best defense to her witty son's remarks were to ignore them entirely, but always smiled despite herself. He shrugged and continued to eat away.

"It's not my fault that I seem to be growing into some sort of long-limbed freak, but I've gotta feed the beast," he said with his mouth full, following it with a gulp of milk.

"And you're eating your poor mother out of house and home..." she replied absently as she opened the envelope of pictures. She pulled the pages of proofs out and began to go through them, excited at first, exclaiming her son to be so handsome when she saw the formal pictures, which only elicited a severe eye-rolling from the boy, who had now commandeered a bag of potato chips and sat down beside her, munching loudly in her ear.

Then she got quiet as they looked through the rest of the pictures, of him in his basketball jersey and shorts, another next to some garish graduation year numbers that garnered a sneer from her son, and then, on the last page she stopped altogether and stared. He knew the stare; the one he'd seen as a kid, and the one that he'd catch on her face more and more in these last couple years. He looked down intently at this last batch of photos, taking the opportunity to try and figure out after all of this, what exactly set her off like this.

It was just him in an old v-neck sweater and white collared shirt, he couldn't figure it out. He wasn't crossing his eyes, he wasn't doing anything funny.

"What is it mom? Is my fly down in these?" he looked down closer, trying to make a joke to snap her out of it, as he expected her to do. But this time she persisted.

"Where did you get those clothes?" she asked softly, in a tone which he'd never heard from her before that made his chest squeeze on itself a little. The sweater. He knew he shouldn't have gone through those boxes.

"Erm... my closet?" he said sheepishly, trying to avoid being caught snooping.

"That sweater... I never bought you that," she said, her voice still far away.

"Ah... cause well, maybe I got it out of a box at gramma's house last summer," he added, pursing his lips nervously and running a hand through his wavy brown hair. "She had me clean the basement and I found some boxes with your name on them," he paused, looking at her again, but she was still fixated on the pictures. "I... kinda went through one, but all's I found were some old bedsheets and a couple of guy's shirts and that sweater. I figured the box was mislabeled or something and that the shirts were all grampa's that he couldn't wear cause they were so big. I asked gramma if I could keep them... you know, she said that those weren't grampa's, but I should keep them anyway. That was kind of weird..."

It began to click. As he watched his mother trace her fingernail across his lopsided smile in the top left picture, where he was posed, as he often did, with his hands carelessly into his pockets and shoulders shrugged forward, he knew that it wasn't him she was seeing in that picture.

"Mom... mom?" he said with an edge on his voice, and resorted to shaking her shoulder.

"Jay, don't ever wear that sweater again," she said in nearly a whisper, her tone indiscernible.

"It's dad's sweater, isn't it?" he murmured, knowing that he was opening up a can of worms that he was tired of having to keep closed.

"I have to go and get ready, you know I'm having dinner with Robert tonight and I can't be late," she said, getting up and not looking back at her son, "there's chicken leftover from last night, and I've left some money if you want to go and get something—"

"Why won't you ever tell me about him? What did he do to you that I can't know about, mom? I'm gonna be eighteen in less than a year and I don't know a thing about him except that for some reason you can't bear to say anything about him to me ever! Do I look like him now? Does it hurt you to look at me? What did the bastard do to you that I shouldn't know about? If he's that bad, let me hate him, because I should hate anyone that's hurt you, mom, but I want to know!"

She stood there with her back to him for a minute, the words that had been on the tip of his tongue for years now still stinging the air between them. She wouldn't turn around, and he finally saw a drop fall to the carpet from her cheek, and instantly regretted his outburst.

"Mom... I – I'm sorry I yelled, but, I can't go my whole life without knowing..."

Without reply, she walked to her room and shut the door with a gentle click of the knob. The boy, frustrated, punched his fist to the wall and fumed back to the living room and turned on the TV.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox

It never seemed weird growing up without a dad. I mean, really, like half of the kids I went to school with either had a stepdad or their parents were divorced, or some kids, like me, never even knew who he was. I was always glad at least I didn't have to spend every other weekend with some dude I hardly knew who I had to call dad.

I have just a few memories of my grandparents from his side, but they died in a car accident when I was four and we were living in Boston that year, so it wasn't like we saw them much. They all lived near Scranton, where mom's from. I guess with them as my only real connection to that side of my family, that was the end of it, right? Maybe for the better? I've never known anything about them, only that their last name was 'Halpert'.

The only thing I really know about my dad is that his name was James, just like mine. I think I was ten when I found that out, and it made me hope that my mom had loved him or something like that enough to give me his name, but I've rethought that recently. She's always called me "Jay", and that's what I've been called at school since I was five, I mean, everyone except some of my teachers who insist on calling me "James Beesley" whenever they can, but it's the dumbest shortening of that name that I've ever heard, but maybe it's the least like my real name that she could get. Maybe she liked him still when I was born, but wants to forget him now. Anyway, I still kinda don't like being called 'Jay"... sounds dumb.

But all I'm left with are clues that make me think that she was hurt by him somehow -- she has no pictures of him, they were never married, and she's always seemed hesitant to date again – heck, Robert's the first guy she's been on more than two dates with as far as I can remember. I can't like someone who hurt mom. I've been feeling like I hate him for it.

But I still want to know for sure. I want to know where I came from.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

"Pam, you've looked haunted all night," said Robert, a very sensitive and supportive man of forty-five whom she had met a couple of years ago at an art show in San Francisco – she was there showing some paintings she had done between the big graphic jobs that she tended to receive, as her reputation had earned her a fine position in a design firm based in the city of Petaluma, a bedroom community north of Marin. He had been in high-tech for twenty years, and having made his fortune and exhausted himself, turned to a second career in the buying and selling of fine art. They'd remained friends since then, but only recently had Pam taken the chance of opening herself up to him becoming something more than that.

"Hm? I'm sorry, what was that?" she asked, looking sleepily at him over her wine glass.

"Sweetheart, something's bothering you, and it's bothering you bad. I've only seen you this bothered when it comes to something about Jay," he saw her eyes flash with apprehension at the mention of her son, and he knew he'd hit the nail on the head. "C'mon, you can't keep all your troubles bottled up forever. I know it's what you single moms tend to do with all that you have on your shoulders alone, but, well, I'd like to think that you're not as alone as maybe you once were. So please, I want to help, or just listen if that's it."

She looked up into his pleading eyes, and felt his hand cover hers warmly. After a moment of hesitation, she smiled sheepishly, "You sure you want to get mixed up in all of this?"

"Yes. I care about you, Pam, and I'm ready to try and take whatever you can give."

She gulped, and began: "You know about my last relationship and how it ended," she saw him nod, "but, what I haven't mentioned... is that, well, I've never been able to bring myself to tell Jay about his father, about what happened...

"—I know what you're thinking! I've thought it myself thousands of times! Why on earth would I keep my son from knowing who his dad was and the bare facts of why he hasn't been there for him. But... it came with protecting him from my pain and the pain of living in the shadow of someone he'd never know, and perhaps the regret of having lost. When he was a little boy, it didn't matter, and I never brought it up. I'm sure he doesn't think he's weird and accepted like so many other children who've never known their fathers as a fact of life.

"But I think as he got older, he realized that even the kids whose dads were a one night stand knew that was the case, and had some inkling of where they had come from. And I would have thought after ten years, it would have come easier, but the boy... Robert, Jay looks so much like Jim that at times I feel like I could die, seeing him there, but not there, and my boy, my sweet baby boy, I've been so afraid of losing him too..." she paused to wipe the tears out of the corners of her eyes and forcing an embarrassed smile back at her companion, who urged her on with another rub to her fingers.

"Today. Today Jay came home with the proofs for his senior portraits, and... oh, every look, every manner is so much like Jim, it took everything in me to not cry... but the last set, he was wearing a brown sweater that I would recognize anywhere. Jay had found it in a box at my mom's when he was there last summer and she gave it to him! She knew what it was, that it was Jim's, and she knew that I hadn't told him yet. Arrgh... I know she wanted this to happen. But beyond just wearing that sweater, he wore it in such a way, with a white dress shirt and the sleeves rolled up over the sweater, and the way he leaned with his hands jammed into his pockets, smiling with that same smile that Jim used to greet me with every day..."

"He blew up at me when I asked him not to wear it again. He's right to be mad. I never wanted to keep this from him for so long, but to pretend that we had our perfect little mom and son world was what kept me going for so long, that I've been afraid... afraid to remember, afraid for him to know, and know how guilty I still am at times..."

"Pam, surely you can't feel responsible for what happened anymore," Robert pressed her, and she shook her head.

"I know the facts, I know it wasn't something that I caused or could have even prevented, but... after eighteen years I still feel the burden."

A silent moment passed between them, his hands still enfolding hers. He broke the silence with the obvious next step: "You have to tell him, sweetheart. He's almost a man, and he doesn't deserve to go into adulthood not knowing half of where he came from when that information is available."

"I know, Robert. I know, and I've known for years. I just have to do it." She scooted her chair back, and he stood with her. "That's always been the hardest part."

"Call me tomorrow?" he asked her, slipping her coat onto her over her bare shoulders and placing a gentle kiss on her forehead.

"Certainly." She breathed in roughly and slowly let it out.

"I'll be thinking about you two tonight."

xoxoxoxoxoxoxo

She walked back into her house at half-past nine to find her son in the backyard shooting baskets, as he always did when he was troubled. She sighed again, and doffed her coat atop where he had left his things earlier, letting herself remember that the messiness was definitely a trait he'd inherited from his mother.

"Jay?" she called to him as she slid the kitchen door open.

"Hey mom, how's Robert?" he said absently as he caught the ball again and bounced it a couple of times before he took another shot. She saw it bounce off of the rim and into the grass – never a good sign, she knew; he only missed when he was very upset.

"He's well, sends his regards," she paused, steeling herself up for what was to come next. "Jay... James, we need to talk. It's something I've been needing to tell you for a long time, and, well it's overdue. Come on," she put her mother tone on, to which her son always grudgingly obeyed, and shuffled towards the door, forgetting his ball in the grass.

He slumped into a chair at the kitchen table, and looked up at her as she was walking to her room, hesitated, then spoke up, "Mom... I'm sorry... sorry I yelled."

She smiled sadly back at his troubled face. "It's ok. I deserved your words, and we're going to talk about all of that. I'll be back in a second."

He gulped; he wasn't sure what she was going to say, and for the first time since he had wondered about his paternity, he was worried that he wouldn't like what he was about to hear. He set himself to steeling for the worst; he had imagined that his father was a rapist, was a killer in jail, was a detestable one-night stand, or that he had left his mother after promises of making her an honest woman, anything like that. He was almost sure it had to be horrible the way she had kept it from him for his entire life.

She returned, having changed into her robe again and produced a banker's box from somewhere in the recesses of her closet. He'd seen it before, but only as a child while playing hide and seek in her room and never thought anything of it – it was unmarked and among many other boxes from their many moves through the years.

"I'm going to tell you some of the more intimate, and sometimes embarrassing facts of my younger days, so bear with me," she began, taking a deep breath afterwards, opened the box and produced a picture album and a smaller box which she left unopened.

"When I was in my twenties I worked as a receptionist at a small paper company in Scranton, which is about an hour away from where gramma lives. I worked there because the man that I was dating, and unfortunately living with at the time, insisted I get a job there along with him. That man was Roy Anderson, and I was actually engaged to him for about... um, four years." She produced a picture of herself and Roy from their happier days that was lying loose under the cover of the album.

"So... is that my real dad?" he pointed at Roy.

Pam looked at him like he were a madman. "Roy? Oh my god, no way. If Roy were your father... well... bleh, I don't even want to think about it. No, Roy wasn't very nice to me; he wasn't abusive, he... just didn't get me. But we were together a long time, even though I wasn't happy. But while I was working there, I became friends with a prankster junior paper salesman. That man, Jim Halpert, would be your father."

With another sigh she opened the album, and Jay found himself excited to actually see what his father had actually looked like, regardless of what kind of man he thought he was. It was unmistakable, as he could now see, that this man, smiling in so many pictures with a cuter and younger version of his mother, was without any mistake his father. What then struck him more was how happy his mom was in every photograph with him, smiling a smile that he had only seen her give to him in their closest mother-son moments. His mother continued to slowly page through the album, leaf by leaf, a wistful smile overcoming her face and her eyes shimmering and red-rimmed.

"It was long and complicated, but over the course of three very long years we both figured out that we were in love with each other," she went on as she continued to turn each page over after briefly considering the picture, "through fiancées and jealous girlfriends, through job moves and so many missed connections, but in the summer of 2007 we finally were together as a couple. We wasted so much time..." the last part added almost under her breath as she saw a picture of them from that awful year, with Karen working in the background.

Jay continued to look at every photograph, rapt. He was amazed at this point, at how much he favored him, in height, in mannerisms, in his same silly smile. It was spooky, even, for him to feel as if he were looking at himself, save a more mature face and straight face, but to know that it was not. One picture suddenly caught his eye, and he stopped his mother's hand from turning the page. It was a candid photograph of Jim leaning against a wall, hands in his pockets, and wearing a very familiar brown sweater.

"Mom... that's the sweater," he said, his voice amazed, and Pam looked at him and nodded with a smile and tears in her eyes. "He... I mean, I... I look just like him. This is so strange..." he trailed off.

"So what happened?" he began again, remembering after the shock of seeing so many pictures at once began to subside a bit that he still wanted to know what had occurred between this man and his mother to have left her in such a way, "He had to have hurt you, didn't he? I mean, you wouldn't have kept this from me, or he'd still be around if something bad hadn't happened between you? I... I've been so mad this man for years for leaving you alone and hurt, I think I've hated him even... but it's weird that all I see is you and him so happy together..."

"No, oh my god, no... Jay, I never wanted you to hate your father!" she said to him, aghast at what her son had just told her. "Never, never! I... I just couldn't bear to talk about him, to have the ghosts around me while I wanted to just move forward and focus on nothing but you instead of all the sadness that I've felt..."

"Then... what happened, mom?" he asked her guilelessly, sounding more like the little boy he used to be than the man he nearly was.

"I... I..." she knew that this was the hardest part for her, and still, after eighteen years, the sadness would sometimes catch her again like this like it has just happened all over again, but she pushed on through the gathering tears. "I went into a three month program at the Pratt art institute after Jim and I had been dating about a year. He always wanted me to follow my dreams, and so I lived in New York, and he stayed in Scranton. The distance, even as relatively short as it was, was very hard on us, but even through that, he proposed to me after I'd been there a month. We were going to get married, after I was done with school and I felt like all my dreams were finally coming true.

"In my last month there, when stuff was really strained, we got into an argument about something stupid, but we were both so tired and strained from the distance, it really blew up. We'd never had a fight like that. I told him to just go home, and he did; went all the way back to Scranton. After a couple of hours I cooled off and realized how dumb it had all been, and I knew I had to do and see him and make it better. But the whole drive I remember feeling like I was racing against time for some reason that I didn't know...

"When I got to his house, he was so happy to see me and almost apologized before I could – that's just how we were, somehow thinking the same thought as the other. We decided to stay in for dinner because he told me that he'd been feeling like he was getting a chest cold and had felt a little woozy all day, so I went to the store to pick up some food to make at his apartment. When I got back... when I got back..."

She sniffled loudly, a number of great tears escaped her eyes and the haunted look on her face reminded him of all of those times she had acted 'weird' when he was a kid, and knew where it all came from now. He slid his chair close to his mother's side and rubbed her back and held her hand. Her bottom lip trembled and she looked back at him blinkingly, unable to get to the next part.

"Jim... my dad... he died, didn't he?" he whispered to his mother, everything suddenly clicking into place in his mind. Pam could only nod her head at this point, sniffling, staring down at one of the last pictures of him in the album and touched it tenderly with one of her slender fingers.

Jay's heart was pounding. In his mind, he could somehow see the scene play out before him: a young version of his mom returning home with groceries, she calls his dad's name and sees him on the couch, asleep. She drops the bags off in the kitchen, then lovingly walks to him, bidding him to wake up. After he doesn't respond to her voice, she shakes his shoulder, as she often did to him when he was running late for school, but his father doesn't respond. He can imagine, then, the first time that horrified, haunted look found its way onto his mother's face; how because of all of those happy pictures, she must have cried his name out, over and over again, shook him, sobbing and sobbing...

"How?" was all he could muster as he sniffed back a tear of his own.

"He... there was no way anyone could have known there was anything wrong with him; he'd been so strong and healthy. But, some people are born with hearts that have some sort of silent weakness. Sometimes a doctor will catch it by chance before it goes bad, sometimes there are warning signs. Most often, there's no way to ever know it before the heart suddenly succumbs to the defect and... that's what happened to Jim. That's why you've grown up without the father you deserved to have known."

Pam looked over at her son, mopping up the tears on her own face with one of the corners of her robe: the boy's face was overcome with more emotions and more information than he could grapple with in one moment, his eyes red and full with tears, though he was doing everything he could to keep them from shedding.

"I'm sorry," she said to him, enfolding one of his hands into her own, trying not to notice again, how much even her son's hands were like Jim's. "I know I never should have kept this from you. I... I've carried around a lot of guilt since he died... I was sure that if I hadn't fought with him that night, or if I'd just stayed there with him that I could have done something to save him. And even after we knew what had taken him, that there was nothing that anyone ever could have done to have saved him, I still felt that somehow this was my punishment for ignoring him those years before when he'd done nothing but love and support me while I was with someone else, for refusing him when he finally put it all on the line to just tell me that he loved me... and then...

"I found out that I was pregnant with you two weeks later."

Her son's eyes widened and he suddenly felt pulled into this story which up until now hadn't directly involved him at all. Now it did.

"We hadn't been planning anything, but everyone knows that birth control isn't foolproof. I'd never felt so happy and so sad at the same time... He never even knew about you, Jay; he would have been so happy, and it killed me inside knowing that he didn't even get to know that he was a father. He loved children. He would have loved you so much, Jay, you don't even know. Everything you've done through your childhood, from playing in the dirt with your toy trucks to playing basketball, I've always seen the vacant spot next to you where he would have been perfectly thrilled to watch you, to help you, to just be proud of you.

"But... I can't give you a great reason for not telling you about your dad. It started out as an excuse for you to not feel like you were living in his shadow, that you wouldn't wonder what some milestone in your life would be like if only your father hadn't died before you were born. You were such a happy, wonderful boy, and you've been the one focus of my life since the day you were born. And over the years, I've found that I loved what we had, what you and I had as mother and son, I was afraid, afraid of opening up all of these sad memories and somehow losing us. And the only thing that I'm afraid of in this world anymore is losing you."

Pam looked up to see that her son's big green eyes had finally overrun with tears; she hoped that her candor wasn't causing him too much embarrassment or pain. He tried to smile at her, when he caught her gaze, and she knew that he was trying to understand, to come to terms with what he'd only just found and lost at once, but also to know with no short measure of how completely his mother loved him.

"I know that your heart at least doesn't have the same defect as Jim's – you probably don't remember, but you've had a number of scans when you were very little – but if I ever lost you, my one joy, my one amazing piece of him that I still have, I couldn't go on. I have to admit... sometimes my heart simply aches when I look at you now, and for a moment, I swear I've seen him again in one of your smiles, in that slouchy way you hang around the kitchen and bother me when I'm cooking," she smiled at him and he laughed just a little, "You have grown up to be so much like him, even though you've never even met... and I know it's not a compliment for every teenage boy to be told that they're like their father, but I can't think of a better person for my son to take after."

The air hung thick with emotions, memories, and new feelings that neither mother nor son would be able to sort through in one evening, even one month. But between them, there was a new understanding and a new feeling of wholeness to their little family, and Pam knew, though her fears of changing their dynamic still tugged at her mind somewhat, that what was in store for them was much better.

She leaned out of her chair and hugged her precious son to her as tightly and as consumed with motherly love as she had the first moment she held him. He embraced her back, burying his face into her shoulder, comforting himself in the familiar scent of her curly hair and perfume as he had done for as long as he could remember. They parted, and she looked up at him earnestly.

"Well... I think this has been enough heavy stuff for one night. You feel up for some late night fries?" she asked him, smiling playfully at her son's reddened face.

"Well... only if you're buying, cause I'm broke!"

They laughed together again; Pam and her boy knew that they were going to be just fine.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox

That night was just the beginning of a lot of new things for me and mom. I can't say that all of the feelings were easy to deal with, and I can't say that we didn't fight over the subject of my dad a few more times. But it's been good, really. Maybe I am glad in a little way that I could come to know who my dad was now that I'm grown up... maybe I would have had some resentment when I was younger if I had known why I didn't have a dad to help me with stuff. Now, I can at least understand and know that he'd loved my mom, and that there wasn't anything about her, or about me that had caused him to leave us behind.

She's told me so many stories over the last year about him; his funny pranks on that guy they used to work with, and the elaborate ways he used to cheer her up when she was having problems with that other guy she was dating. How he tossed all that pretense to the side when he proposed to her in the rain at a truck stop because he simply couldn't wait anymore. And through all this, I've watched her heal, I think. She smiles now when she remembers a story about him, and when I get that look, you know, that look that I've gotten my whole life... she doesn't look pained anymore. She said once that it's not like being haunted so much anymore when she sees our resemblance, but she's happy that I've become the kind of man that he'd be proud of.

Mom's always wanted to make sure that I never felt like I was living in a shadow, especially now that I know all of her feelings on who and what I've been at times, so she was hesitant when I asked her what she felt about me taking on my dad's last name. Maybe it was a little weird because I asked her after we'd just visited the cemetery where he's buried when we were visiting gramma this summer, but... I wanted to do something to keep us connected, even though he was long gone. It really didn't take much coaxing, though; she agreed that "James Halpert" has a better ring to it than "James Beesley".

I started college at UCLA just a few weeks ago now. Mom had that look like she did on my first day of second grade when she dropped me off at the dorms, but this time I promised her that I'd be careful, and I'd try my best to tolerate her calls as often as I expected them to come. It made her laugh.

We'd agreed, on the drive down that now that I'm a 'big boy' in college that maybe I could drop the 'Jay' nickname. She never realized that I didn't like it, so she was a little hurt that I was throwing off the diminutive she'd given me, but in the end she could agree that 'James' is much more grown up and respectable name to use going into the 'real world', just as long as she could still call me "Jay" at home. Seemed like a reasonable compromise.

Well, I haven't told her yet, it's all been a big failure. All the guys in my dorm refuse to call me James since our RA decided we all needed nicknames during an icebreaker during welcome week. I've tried to protest, but it's hard to get sixty people to change their first impression.

So now I guess I'm "Jim". Mom's gonna flip, but I guess it's just fate. But my question: Is the world ready for another Jim Halpert?

I know somewhere, dad's laughing at all of this.


End file.
